I have published my eighth novel in the last six years. (This is, of course, a re-post of an old essay.) Sure, it is through mostly self-publishing of novels that no one but me has ever read. Catch a Falling Star and Snow Babies both had a professional editor, one who had worked for Harcourt and one who worked for PDMI. Magical Miss Morgan has had a proofreader who made numerous stupid mistake errors that I had to change back to the original meticulously by hand. But all three of those novels won an award or were finalists in a young adult novel contest. I do have reason to believe I am a competent writer and better even than some who have achieved commercial success.
But what is the real reason that I am so intent on producing the maximum amount of creative work possible in this decade? Well, to be coldly objective, I am a diabetic who cannot currently afford insulin. I have been betrayed by the for-profit healthcare system that treats me as a source of unending profit. I am like a laying hen in the chicken house, giving my eggs of effort away to a farmer who means to eat my very children if time and circumstance allows. I am the victim of six incurable diseases and conditions that I got most likely as a result of exposure to toxic farm chemicals in the early 70’s. I am also a cancer survivor from a malignant melanoma in 1983, and for three years now I have not been able to get the preventative cancer tests I am supposed to be receiving every year for the rest of my life. My prostate could very well be cancerous as I write this. If that is so, it will kill me unawares, because I don’t even want to know about having a disease I can’t possibly afford to fight all over again.’
So, the basic reason I am going through the most productive and creative period of my entire life is because I have a great rage to create before I die and I could be dying as soon as tonight. All of the countless stories in my head clamoring to be written down before it is too late cry out to me desperately for my immediate attention.
I will, then, continue to write stories and draw cartoons and other Paffoonies for as long as I am still able, and possibly even afterward. I have, after all, threatened repeatedly to become a ghostwriter after I die. And, yes, I understand when you scream at my essay that that is not what a ghostwriter is. But if a woman can channel the ghost of Franz Schubert and finish his unfinished symphony…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Brown_(spiritualist))
—then I should also be able to tell my stories from beyond the grave. I have been percolating them in my head and writing and drawing them in whole or in part since 1974. I have too much time and too many daydreams wrapped up in them to let it all just evaporate into the ether. In summation, I am claiming stupidly that my novels, crack-brained and wacky as they are, are somehow destined to exist, either because of me or in spite of me. So just be happy that I write what I write, for there is an art to being Mickey, and I am the one artist and writer who is the best Mickey possible if truly there ever was a real Mickey.
Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Walt Disney, and Edgar Allen Poe (the four clowns depicted above) all probably had times in their writing life when they didn’t really have anything to write about. Charles Dickens couldn’t think of anything but his time in the boot-black factory and the misery he felt as a child raised in poverty. So, what did he do? He created Wilkins Micawber as a stand-in for his ne’er-do-well father who always believed, “Something will presently turn up.” And he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.
William Shakespeare didn’t actually write anything with his grade-school education and limited knowledge of the world. But when the Earl of Oxford who used his name as a nom de plume could think of nothing, he thought of ending it all, and the “To-be-or-not-to-be…” play, Hamlet, poured out of his quill pen onto paper.
And when Walt Disney rode the train in defeat, having lost his best comic character for cartoons, Oswald the Rabbit, to his old boss, he doodled a mouse and named him Mickey, even providing Mickey’s falsetto voice for decades on the silver screen. Oh, and claiming the rights to any further characters his studios produced… to this day.
Poe looked at the bust over his chamber door… and saw a raven. Instantly, NEVERMORE.
Now it’s Mickey’s turn to write about nothing, and try to live up to the nothing-masters’ artistic masterpieces of yore. For instance, the boy in the picture. I drew him from a nude model in a black-and-white photo. Nobody in class, not even the one who brought the picture, ever told me his name. And the class was forty-four years ago now. So, assuming the picture wasn’t old back then, the boy is now older than fifty-four, and possibly significantly older than that now. So it is a picture of a nude nobody in front of an abandoned house in the snow however-many years ago in a place that is probably nowhere now. And I won’t even mention the imaginary puzzle pieces floating through the air for nobody to put together. What’s that? I just mentioned them? What did I mention? They are really just nothing.
So, there is a time and a place for writing about everything. Even if that everything includes nothing… and that nothing is nowhere… and is about nobody.
Who is really qualified to judge people? The Bible says only God makes that judgment. But who tells us what God’s judgment actually is? Especially if Nietzsche is right about God being dead?
Prudes
Not long ago I posted a short-short story about me wanting to see girls get naked while we were kite flying, and then, by verbal tricks backfiring, I ended up being the only one flying the kite while naked. I look back on that story now with laughter about my own personal foibles. But if I am completely honest, the church ladies with gray hair, wagging fingers, and tongues that are even waggier… Well, I am glad that the ones I knew as a boy are all now dead and can’t possibly read that story and shame me all over again.
And I know that I draw an awful lot of pictures and write an awful lot of stories that involve naked children. As a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault when I was ten (a thing that happened after the kite story was already in the past) there is a level of discomfort over recognizing that trend in myself. Not because I became a sexual predator of children. I clearly did not. I still am determined to prevent such things from happening in any way I can, though in retirement I no longer have access to children to talk with to find out about bad things that may be happening in their lives.
Derfentwinkle and Anneliese are in my current work in progress, and they are fairies both.
I write stories in which some kid characters are naked at times. Sometimes because of curiosity and developing sexuality, sometimes because of growing up in a nudist household, sometimes in their dreams, taking baths, and many other normal functions where clothing is optional. In The Baby Werewolf novel, I included a character who was trying to exploit a young nudist girl to make child pornography. He was the kind of predator I have always resolved to be against, and the book is intended to make readers aware of that kind of dangerous person and recognize where the opportunities to avoid such people lie.
And some of the nude young characters I create like the two fairy girls depicted in the illustration from The Necromancer’s Apprentice merely represent the liberating feeling you can get from embracing your own nude self, a thing my attacker deprived me of during childhood through trauma and fear.
I, as an adult human being, fully accept readers’ rights to be critical of my work and make prudish judgements about my writing. I don’t like that one critic of The Baby Werewolf who said things about my work being creepy for the wrong reasons (it is a horror story after all) and suggesting that maybe I as the author am bad and villainous instead of feeling that way about the villain of the story. It was fiction, not my personal life story. The villain character is not me.
But prudes being prudish and judgmental can do more damage than just hurting an author’s feelings.
I have had two students that I know of who were transexual.
One was raised a boy because he was born with a penis, but in grade school was discovered to have a womb and ovaries. I didn’t know such a condition existed until I saw an episode of Marcus Welby MD in the 70’s about a young boy who had to transition because he was actually a girl. The child in my class was from a poor Hispanic family that didn’t understand the problem and couldn’t really afford to deal with it. The prudes, judgemental as always, were not kind. This he/she hermaphrodite was forced to grow up as a flamboyantly gay male even though he was capable of physically changing into a woman who could conceive a child. I followed his development for as long as I was able. I did spend one long and awkward evening talking to him/her about his/her crush on me. I could’ve gotten the prude finger-wag over that strange conference too, if anybody had bothered to care about that poor child. I certainly wasn’t going to kiss him, and I had to send him home at the end of that discussion because of what he/she wanted from me. I suspect there were other men who took advantage of him/her. But I wasn’t close enough to help him in any real way. And I lost touch soon after he/she left my class. Based on that bizarre discussion we had, I have no confidence at all that the poor child is still alive. Nobody seemed to care about this child That is the most tragic of things teachers sometimes have to deal with.
The other trans student I had in class for a year was a girl as far as she was concerned. It was not a question open for debate. She was quiet and a good student. She only had a couple of friends, but they were good friends and stood by her. At the time she was in my middle school class, she already had breasts thanks to hormone therapy. By now she has probably transitioned by surgical means. Her life was a lot easier than the boy with ovaries. But prudes in Texas abound and provide a lot of sour fruit.
I personally find it offensive that anyone would deny either of these two people the use of whatever restroom was comfortable for them.
What gives the typical prude the right to pass judgement on anyone else’s behavior? Prudes can cause repression of natural behaviors for the benefit for no one but themselves. I find prudishness to be reprehensible. But the rub is… being judgemental about that makes me a prude too.
I try never to be judgemental. I would much rather accept everyone for who they are, or who they think they are, than rely on what I think they are. And I do listen when others judge me. I have changed things in my books and drawings because of observations by others. And I take everything seriously… especially comedy.
This nudist camp is entirely fictional. The actual camp in Clear Lake is a Methodist Youth Camp.
I have learned a lot more about nudists in the last few months than I probably ever wanted to know. The book I wrote about a boy being invited to go camping with the family of a girl he liked, and then finding out it was a nudist camp, was written as rough draft back in the late 1980’s about life experiences I had in the early ’80’s. Some things I learned back then have proven to still be true. Some things have changed. The things that have changed, are mostly about me.
Nudist families in touch with nature are beautiful in ways I can’t explain. It’s not the clothes the wear.
Naturists are happier than normal people. They shed a lot of their hang ups and worries with their clothes. Sunshine and cool breezes on bare skin have a healthy psychological effect. I know this from having experimented myself. Socially nudists are able to comfortably “live in their skin”. Their confidence in self translates into sensible nude social behavior. It is not about sex. Sex is private behavior to a nudist, not public. When nudists interact, the conversations occur eye to eye, not eye to somewhere else. And the acceptance of how others look when naked is a critical factor in nude social interaction being beneficial. Most nudists are not beautiful or ugly. They are a spectrum of everything in between. And they don’t talk about body parts or make comparisons. Nudist men talk about sports teams and vehicle repair and politics the same way the guys in overalls at the Nutrena Feed and Farm Store. Nudist women talk about… well, the stuff women talk about in the secret language of women that guys like me don’t understand.
Sherry Cobble at the Sunshine Club
So those things about the nudist community have not changed over time. True in the 1960’s is true today. The thing most of you don’t realize is that there are lot more nudists in the world than you are reasonably ready to admit. And the nudist community has a lot more old naturists than you probably thought possible. Naked wrinkles and beer bellies are a thing.
What I have learned about myself by joining the nudist community (though only once at only one of the several nudist camps available in sunny Texas) is that the nakedness and thoughts about nakedness in my novels is there for a reason, and it will not go away. I am trying to be a Young Adult novelist, which means my novels are basically aimed at a junior high and high school audience. I have to dance a carefully straight line between the need to be honest with naked reality and Amazon’s prohibition of adult content in YA novels. Sherry Cobble luring young boys into going camping naked with her family is on that borderline. It is not sexual content. But it is naked content and the barriers have been physically set aside. The humor caused by sexual tension can’t cross the line into bawdy or lewd or pornographic. Nor would I want it to.
But people who write fiction do it not because it’s fun. It is necessary. We have lived lives that leave us damaged in ways that can only be fixed through fiction. The world has to be reshaped in words by people who can’t live with the world the way it was. The truth is, I was sexually assaulted when I was a child, one traumatic event that clouded and warped my self-confidence, my sex life, and my self-concept. Healing has been a life-long process. In fiction, it means characters having to deal with the naked truth and make peace with it. This I believe I have done in so many different ways as a teacher, a husband, a father, and a story-teller, that it simply has to be shared. I will publish Superchicken on Amazon soon, and hopefully Edward-Andrew’s nudist adventure will pass the Amazon test. I have some nutty nudist notions in my nerdy old noodle, but in a novel, they can all be made new.
This post was originally published in November of 2017.
Mickey Mouse was born on November 18, 1928 in the film “Steamboat Willie”. This month will be his 96th Birthday. He’s still pretty spry for such an old guy. My own father is pretty close to the same age, born in about 1932.
And I… I was born in a blizzard in 1956, on November 17th, the day before his 28th birthday. Don’t do the math. I don’t really want to know how old I am. I have six incurable diseases, and I may be adding a seventh to that, depending on what my cardiologist finds out. I survived malignant melanoma in 1983. I am deeply grateful for every day of the 41 years I have lived since.
This post started out as something about birthdays. Mickey’s and mine (who am also Mickey)… But I think it is really about numbers. There are still important numbers to consider. I have published twenty novels, two books of short essays, a book-length essay on nudism, and a book of poetry. Aeroquest and Catch a Falling Star are the first two books I published. But I have since turned Aeroquest into four novels with a planned fifth and possible sixth book. This was done because Publish America was a criminal publishing scheme and held my book hostage for seven years. Snow Babies is the best story I ever wrote. I have written a number of hometown stories about the little town in Iowa in which I grew up. The Bicycle-Wheel Genius,Superchicken, The Baby Werewolf, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, Sing Sad Songs, and The Boy… Forever are a few of these. The Magical Miss Morgan is the last book I published with a pay-to-publish publishing scheme. From here on I only publish for free with Amazon. Even the literary agents that call me only want to charge me money to promote my books. So, I want to write and publish more for free. People are reading my books and I am having precious little success as a mostly-unknown author. How much time do I really have left? I confess to having at least five novel-length stories that are only written in my head and outlined on paper. The clock is ticking. I want to share all of these stories, but I know I probably do not have 86+ years. I truly believe that both this Mickey and that Mickey are capable of speaking to the ages, but it can only happen if I get my words shared so that somebody I do not know will read them, smile a little, laugh a little, maybe cry a little, and understand what I tried to say.
So here’s a self-portrait of what Mickey once looked like (before the beard and long hair) along with Valerie Clarke, the main character of Snow Babies, and the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa.
When you are a writer, you look for conflict constantly. It is a fact of the writing life that stories need conflict to drive them forward, whether they are non-fiction reports, biographies, or histories, or they are fiction stories full of made-up people and made-up events. But we are in a time in history where the conflict in real life is hitting everywhere. No place, in reality, is safe.
Using straw men in arguments comes with the caution that some who have straw for brains can actually solve problems.
What do I mean about there being no real-life safety?
Well, barring a technological magic bullet and a complete revolution in the way corrupt capitalists do politics, the Earth will probably become a lifeless hot rock more like the surface of the planet Venus than any kind of Edenic utopia. If the Republicans take back power next month, kiss goodbye the human race in any form but zoo animals in alien zoos on other worlds.
And Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in the head with a hammer because of Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney’s Neanderthal political practices. Men in camo and bullet-proof vests watch polling places to presumably threaten non-white, non-Trumpy voters. Republicans are probably out-voting Democrats, thus sealing our fate. Republicans choose profits for themselves over life on Earth.
An early Christmas greeting because I am very optimistic for a pessimist, as well as chronically early.
I, of course, am no more safe than anybody else. In some ways, as a writer of fiction, I am less safe than the rest of you. My imagination gives me near prescience about the bad things that can happen to me. And I write fiction about love and forgiveness and a sense of community good in solving the chaotic conflicts of life, All you have to do is get naked, figuratively and in reality both, in order to combat the dangerous world around you. But, of course, it means you have no sort of armor at all to protect you from the wounds of life’s many predators.
This last week, I faced a predator like that, in the form of a marketing service wanting to make my book Catch a Falling Star available at a library conference in New Orleans. Of course, only for the slight fee of $850.00. Now, it goes without saying, I could really use exposure like this to help sell my books. But the price is far more than I would ever recoup from royalties. And the salesman tried to hurry my decision. He offered to talk to his manager about giving me three payment installments, a used-car-dealer tactic. And he urged me to sign up before he would give me a chance to google his company, his emails, and his Better-Business-Bureau rating. He had no mercy for the fact that his efforts to keep me talking caused me to have a coughing fit. I ended the ordeal by hanging up on him. I did not answer when he called me back.
The world is ending. I am living in a house that threatens to fall upon my head at any moment. And two book-marketing schemers have now contacted me, one to scam me out of my publishing rights, and another trying to get a lot of my money for very little real value.
How will this story end? I have yet to learn how the conflict will be resolved. But I know it will not be safe.
Yes, he’s at it again. Silly old Mickey in his birthday suit is writing metaphorically about nudity, nakedness, and naturism. The gross old coot has to do something to survive the Texas heat.
You are probably thinking, and rightly so, that since the crazy old bird was a school teacher for 31 years, and a school student for 18 years before that to become one, he’d be a bit more circumspect about his teacher-honor than to be going around promoting public nudity on his silly little blog again. And you’d be right. This society we now live in doesn’t seem like it is going to approve public nudity generally anytime soon. Most places around the USA make it illegal to go outside your house in nothing but the skin you were born in. You can be arrested for public indecency. Especially if you are ugly when you are naked.
You know it didn’t used to be that way. The ancient Greeks were wild about public nudity. It was the rule for competing in the Olympics and doing business in the agora in the downtown of every Greek metropolis. In fact, the schools that ancient-Greek Mickey would have taught in required the students to be naked for half the day at the very least as they attended school. Of course, those laws only applied to boys. Nobody really wanted to see a naked girl back then. Unless she was made of marble and depicted Aphrodite. They were wild about her naked carcass.
But Mickey learned that being a teacher in the 20th and 21st Century schools of Texas was all about being metaphorically naked.
It’s true. College speech teachers would tell you that, to overcome stage fright on the first day of class, you needed to imagine your students were naked to put yourself at ease, feeling superior because you were dressed and they were not.
But Mickey looked out at those classes of 25 to 30 students, unwashed, feral, and completely hormone-fueled, and realized they really were naked… metaphorically. Even with what passed for clothing on their sweaty little monster bodies, you could still see every naked fault, attitude, indiscretion, and sometimes beauty about them, even when packed in layers with a snowsuit on top. But it never snowed in South Texas back then anyway. They were as good as naked all the time. You could literally see which ones were evil, which were shrinking violets, which were hungry predators, and which ones were imagining the teacher naked to swing the advantage over to themselves.
And teaching entire classrooms full of naked twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds, you learned to understand what their needs really were. You could see their naked shame at not being able to read as well as the smart girls in class. You could see which ones were bullied in school and probably belittled even at home. And you learned to love them… even the bad ones… in a non-inappropriate way. Teacher love. Because they were naked. Metaphorically. At least, that’s what stupid Mickey thought.
And being metaphorically naked means many things at once. In their unarmored form, naked people are vulnerable. They are also not hiding anything under disguises or costumes that make you think they are something they are not. That leather jacket on that metaphorically naked little boy doesn’t hide the fact that he’s insecure about his male peers thinking he is only acting tough because he’s trying to hide the fact that he may be gay. Or that naked little girl in the tight blue jeans and shirt two sizes too small is afraid that she will never find love amongst the male orangutans and gorillas she is most fascinated by.
And naked angels in European art in the Middle Ages symbolized metaphorically, purity and innocence. And some of the naked angels in Mickey’s classes were also metaphorically innocent, no matter how many times they may have goofed up and lost a bit of their innocence.
And they are especially metaphorically naked when they write in their journals, something Mickey made them do at least three days out of five every week. Mickey told them he would read them when he graded them, that they only had to get the two hundred words written in each entry to get an easy 100 percent. And Mickey emphasized that he would read them and not tell anybody else about what they wrote unless they volunteered to have the best stuff read out loud. And, boy howdy! When they told Mickey what they wanted him to know about their naked little lives, it was often stuff that could embarrass Marine Corps drill sergeants, longshoremen, and undercover vice cops. Extremely naked information… metaphorically.
And so, stupid Mickey thought that, just maybe… being metaphorically naked might be good for you. Cathartic and cleansing. And freeing in a way that can only be appreciated by someone who has long been repressed and imprisoned by lingering trauma and fear like Mickey secretly knew something about. Yes, the difference between being metaphorically and literally naked was not very great at all.
And you know what that meant a stupid Mickey was going to think.
In the beginning, God made men naked and helpless. He made women naked and in charge. And then he tossed an apple to the women and said, “let there be evil and monsters and such.” So, naked people began to huddle together in caves to get out of the storm. They began to kill and eat other animals that didn’t eat them. They began to wear the fur of whatever they killed and ate. And then because Cain had a you-like-him-better-than-me fit, they began to kill (and hopefully not eat) each other.
So, the need for government came about as a matter of survival. Cavemen put their thick heads together and decided that some guys were bigger and tougher and got more girls than the rest. And some guys knew how to use their heads for something more than a place to keep their animal-skin hats. So, when all the heads were put together, the smartest ones realized that if they made weapons for the big guys to kill other guys with more efficiently, then the big guys could protect all of “us” and kill all of “them” and we would all be safer and live better lives. Of course, the big strong guys wanted to keep all the better girls and all the stuff they took from others, and they expected everyone they protected to give them more stuff. Thus, taxes were born. And when you had to count stuff and plan stuff and figure stuff out (like managing taxes and keeping track of who you need to hit because they haven’t paid) that task went to the scrawny guys with the big heads. And so, Kings were born. And queens were mostly the kings’ sisters, because, after all, the big guys still got all the best girls. And as time went on, we had kings and their big guys and all the other “common” people. But you couldn’t just kill (and hopefully not eat) all the “common” people, because they were useful too. You could put them to work so they could pay more taxes and make more stuff for you and it made your life better if you had a lot of them working for you. But some old king named Louie discovered you had to make the “common” people a little bit happy too because they outnumber you by a lot. Unfortunately for Louie, he didn’t discover this until they cut his head off… some argument about eating cake or something. So, some other smart guys with big heads got together and decided to make a new government. It was really still the old government. They just had the brilliant idea of re-naming everything and lying to the people. Now, instead of kings and their big guys who got all the good girls, you had “elected representatives” who were actually the kings of old. They just figured out how to lie to people and make them believe they worked for the “common man”. And the big guys were re-named the “Military Industrial Complex”, or maybe it’s the Illuminati. I’m not sure. And then there’s a Pope, and possibly some alien beings from Roswell, and… okay, maybe I need to save the rest for the Tinfoil Hat Club when we meet every Wednesday evening and plot how we are going to “wake up, sheeple” and take over the world. (Dues are fifty cents. We are meeting again on Sunday because we think the world ends next Tuesday… or something.)
Anita Jones is a character in several of my books, but she also represents a girl from my own childhood who was as much of a regret for me as she was for poor old Charlie Brown.
Anita Jones, of course, is not her real name. You can’t even look at the picture and tell by what she looks like who I am secretly portraying. But the thing is, she was definitely real to me. And I would still be horrified to have her find out how I really felt about her.
She was not my first crush. I mooned over the beautiful Alicia Stewart (also not a real name) from second grade through sixth grade. But Anita was always right there. Often right behind me and to my left whenever I turned around on the playground. Not looking me in the eye, but probably looking at me until I began to turn. I know I looked at her whenever she wore dresses or shorts. She had beautiful peach-colored legs.
There was a time when, in Music class, the boys were forced to ask a girl to be a dance partner in the square dancing lessons that Miss Malik was giving us. My best friend Mark had asked Alicia to dance with him, so my number one choice was already taken. And when it was my turn, Anita looked at me with those wonderful brown eyes and heart-shaped face. And I… was too embarrassed to pick her. Then everyone would know how I really felt about her. So, I picked my cousin instead. My heart was lodged in my left shoe for three days after the look I saw on her face. Not my cousin’s face. The brown eyes and heart shape.
Then later, when I was on the high school bus to Belmond, Mickey Schmidt (we never called him Michael because I was Michael) made a joke that embarrassed me.
“Have you ever been caught masturbating in the bathtub?”
“No,” I told him, in disgust. Anita was in the seat across the aisle listening.
“It’s a good place to do it in, then, ain’t it.”
I turned as red as any maple leaf ever managed in late fall. She was smiling at me.
“I would’ve liked to have seen that,” she said. “I bet you even have a lot of hair down there.”
I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so embarrassed that my head might’ve caught fire.
But thinking about that humiliating moment on the bus later, I realized that she had actually been brave enough to admit she was thinking about my genitals. I had never asked her on a date or sat beside her in Art Class as I should have. My life might’ve been very different if I had. Even if I had asked her to dance.
But somewhere in the Multiverse, a parallel me is probably married to a parallel Anita. And I bless them for what might’ve been. At least, it’s lovely to think so now.
This could be a Filipina niece dancing for TikTok, except it’s not. Even all the nieces and nephews have grown to adult size now. Well, the youngest of my wife’s younger sister’s kids might be about this age… but it is not her. Some people in my stories and artworks are made up from thin air.
I have gotten old. This summer has made me feel not merely old… but most sincerely old.
My family of five and my sister on the end. My wife is the shortest one in the picture.
I was visiting my sister at the family farm in Iowa. My whole immediate family, two sons, a daughter, my wife, and I were together again all in one place for the first time in a couple of years. I made it clear that I plan to move to the farm from the Dallas area sometime in 2025. Getting away from the air pollution, traffic, and Texas heat of the big city is essential to my hopes of staying alive for a bit longer. However, my wife is still employed as a teacher in Texas. My daughter is an adult but will stay with her mother in Texas to ensure that her mother will be okay without me. They may both eventually move in with my sister and I, but for now there is good reason to be apart for a bit. Health reasons for me. Teaching job without worrying about going to the ER with me for my wife.
My elder son from Oklahoma is with his fiancee here. My younger son in the Air Force brought his new girlfriend to meet us for the first time.
We more or less have to accept that the inevitable chess game with the Grim Reaper will happen, and nobody wins more than once or twice. Most lose the first try.
My blog was interrupted by my trip this week. The consecutive post streak will have to start again at zero. My writing has been seriously slowed by aging issues. I tend to pass out while writing and reading. I forget things in the middle of the process. Everything is mentally harder. But I am falling into vivid mini-dreams when I pass out. It sometimes seems like reliving a moment in my own life, or… strangely… reliving a moment in the distant past of someone else’s life. The Reaper’s chess board is set up somewhere near. I do have book projects under way. But twenty-four books may have to be enough. We shall see what more I can accomplish. We have to do more with less when we are reaching the end of the story of our life.
My faun, Radasha, is here in the farmhouse kitchen with fruits and vegetables.
Most of my relevant life goes on deep inside my head now. Connecting with the outside world is getting ever harder. The coming darkness does not scare me. Like Mark Twain once allowed… “I am not worried about what comes after life. I was not alive for billions of years before I was born, and I was not bothered about it a bit.”
So, what is today’s blog post actually about? About how the final page of the book will soon be written and the whole book closed. It will not cease to exist. It will simply be over. And what comes after will go on to its appointed ends without me.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Art of Being Mickey
I have published my eighth novel in the last six years. (This is, of course, a re-post of an old essay.) Sure, it is through mostly self-publishing of novels that no one but me has ever read. Catch a Falling Star and Snow Babies both had a professional editor, one who had worked for Harcourt and one who worked for PDMI. Magical Miss Morgan has had a proofreader who made numerous stupid mistake errors that I had to change back to the original meticulously by hand. But all three of those novels won an award or were finalists in a young adult novel contest. I do have reason to believe I am a competent writer and better even than some who have achieved commercial success.
But what is the real reason that I am so intent on producing the maximum amount of creative work possible in this decade? Well, to be coldly objective, I am a diabetic who cannot currently afford insulin. I have been betrayed by the for-profit healthcare system that treats me as a source of unending profit. I am like a laying hen in the chicken house, giving my eggs of effort away to a farmer who means to eat my very children if time and circumstance allows. I am the victim of six incurable diseases and conditions that I got most likely as a result of exposure to toxic farm chemicals in the early 70’s. I am also a cancer survivor from a malignant melanoma in 1983, and for three years now I have not been able to get the preventative cancer tests I am supposed to be receiving every year for the rest of my life. My prostate could very well be cancerous as I write this. If that is so, it will kill me unawares, because I don’t even want to know about having a disease I can’t possibly afford to fight all over again.’
So, the basic reason I am going through the most productive and creative period of my entire life is because I have a great rage to create before I die and I could be dying as soon as tonight. All of the countless stories in my head clamoring to be written down before it is too late cry out to me desperately for my immediate attention.
I will, then, continue to write stories and draw cartoons and other Paffoonies for as long as I am still able, and possibly even afterward. I have, after all, threatened repeatedly to become a ghostwriter after I die. And, yes, I understand when you scream at my essay that that is not what a ghostwriter is. But if a woman can channel the ghost of Franz Schubert and finish his unfinished symphony…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Brown_(spiritualist))
—then I should also be able to tell my stories from beyond the grave. I have been percolating them in my head and writing and drawing them in whole or in part since 1974. I have too much time and too many daydreams wrapped up in them to let it all just evaporate into the ether. In summation, I am claiming stupidly that my novels, crack-brained and wacky as they are, are somehow destined to exist, either because of me or in spite of me. So just be happy that I write what I write, for there is an art to being Mickey, and I am the one artist and writer who is the best Mickey possible if truly there ever was a real Mickey.
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